Visuals:

I really liked the mask code examples and how they interact with basic geometric shapes, like encasing chaos in one small orderly container. So I chose to use triangles with very chaotic (noise, Voronoi, screen recording) fillings. This was to allow for the readability of discrete sounds by affecting the base shapes of containers (triangles!) and complexity by using more fluid cc values to affect noise and other chaotic textures of the shapes.

Edit: After the first day of performances, I changed a lot of my visuals to be more minimalistic and readable in the ways that they interact with the music. I also had to dump many of my previous visuals without looking back, simply because they did not fit the mood of the musical score.

Music:

I think this was the hardest part for me. I never learned to play an instrument or done anything music-related, so I felt very behind in stuff related to TidalCycle. To make up for that I’ve been going to the piano room often and trying to replicate the sounds I made on the keyboard in TidalCycle. It’s been fun and very helpful because it gave me an intuition of what I wanted to go for. The idea was to make a creepy sound, something that inspired anxiety, and contrast it with sounds that brought a soft, almost hopeful joy. Eiden had a very similar project to mine in that aspect and her performance inspired many of the changes I made to mine.

A lot of times for the music I had to borrow other people’s ears to ask what was wrong with the things that bothered me and give them names (learned about dissonant notes). I listened to some soundtracks that reflected my feelings and what I wanted to make out of this piece.